First, some housekeeping…
I have done away with the numbering in the titles. When I launched this project two years ago, I had a guiding idea (an essay + five songs), but no particular roadmap or structure. So, like many, I stole certain trappings from Haley Nahman. I prefer the way my website looks without the numbers. Also, now I can inconspicuously archive posts that no longer resonate with me. I will attempt to be gentle with the red pen: I realize there’s value in tracking my growth. It’s charming and horrifying to witness all the explaining and apologizing I did two years ago (even if that’s ostensibly what I’m doing now).
While I feel moderately embarrassed by most of what I wrote near the start of Insecure Tea, it’s also sweet that my early essays had a sense of looseness and creativity. I was messing around with fonts. I was using subheadings. I was trying much harder to write about the zeitgeist and downtown New York. I had relatively few subscribers. There was a freedom in that. It took at least 20 essays to get close to my current style and standard.
The other change is that I’m testing out a less spelled-out version of the weekly mixtape. Rather than a separate blurb, I’m integrating my references throughout the essay with footnotes, and including a discrete playlist at the end. I’ll still put everything in my Spotify archive playlist, but I’m retiring YouTube, as I get the sense that no one is using it.
And, that’s what’s up! Bark at me if you hate these structural changes. I suspect most will neither notice nor care. Thanks for being here!
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What does change feel like? A breeze on the skin, or a gale that blows a leaf in your eye? A tornado that whips around your coveted library and underpants drawer before littering your upsides down, your insides out? There is a type of change that feels like excitement from some angles, and dread from others. It simmers at the caliber of melancholy and nostalgia and bittersweetness—those sensations that are richer for their ambivalence. I guess the type of change I’m probing at is a subtle, metaphysical thing. A feeling. Or—forgive me—a vibe.
I woke up in June, and my neighborhood became like the places I visit recurringly in my dreams. Familiar, yet slightly discordant. It’s summer and I’ve felt this way before. Unknown. I am melancholy because I am the last man standing in my original dream of New York.
I watch a video. A Snapchat, if I’m being honest. It’s his East Village apartment, emptied of the last three years. There was never any space in there; it would be cruel to call it a three-bedroom apartment, comical to stuff three adult men into its quarters. New York is comical and cruel. The sight of it sends me back four years.
I am at the intersection of Channing and Prospect, at the top of the hill, in front of his darkwood apartment building. It echoes the Craftsman style, like many structures in Berkeley. I’m sitting behind the wheel of my mother’s ‘03 Chevy Tahoe, the one that drove me to second grade in a car seat, the vessel of innumerable trips north, with a decade-old Honey Stix spill in the cup holder and a squiggling blue pen mark on the back seat.
I am having one of the top five cries of my life. Heaving and sobbing. I am so sad and so tired. I’m sad because the person I love has just disappeared from my life in the back of a taxi. An Uber, if I’m being honest.
I’m tired because it’s early in the morning after a week of labor. We climbed and descended so many flights of stairs to unhand his belongings. I didn’t think I’d be sentimental about his corny Central Perk mug, but I tucked it among the belongings I would drive back to LA. He sold his display case to my brother in San Francisco. Things got desperate when we were deconstructing his bedframe and couldn't figure out how to remove the drawers. We considered taking a hammer and simply destroying it all. We were beasts of burden until the last moment. As we hugged and kissed goodbye, our sweat was still drying from dragging his mattress down the block, where we sheepishly left it in front of a co-op house. Someone would take it. We weren’t grown enough to dispose of things properly.
That studio apartment was a reflection of his essence. Humble in a beauty that was somehow both delicate and solid. Ever so slightly inaccessible: high on a hill, it projected loftiness and solitude. But once inside, there was plenty of room and sunshine. Generous enough to showcase the beauty around it.
Everything he had was from Ikea, but somehow it was all the best of Ikea. His taste wasn’t much like mine, yet I respected it. He liked things that were small, simple and practical. He gravitated toward photography. His love of red, white and blue was somehow European. He tolerated all the American kitsch I brought into his life: posters of Marilyn Monroe and Clint Eastwood. A mirror advertising the champagne of beer.
Yet, the walls of his apartment didn’t need adornment. The real showstopper was the view. Beyond the trees and moldering fraternity houses, a glimmering bay. San Francisco and its bridges. The grey one. The red one.
I loved it there. That city held me. Don’t you know that everything changes?1
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Now, he has left New York, and it feels like the nail in the coffin of my first vision of what life would be like here. Adulthood would be an extension of university revelry—scholarly and stupid, rich and poor. On my 23rd birthday, two weeks after my move, a photo of me, him, and three other friends. The caption: Pick up Berkeley and put it in New York.
From the start, of course, this was not true. That was just a dream some of us had.2 It was already too late to pick up where we had left off. When we arrived in the city, we hadn’t graduated a day, a week, or a month prior. Most of us had spent a year quarantining with our parents, watching screens that informed us of millions of deaths. Unable to process this information, we made margaritas. We took long walks and didn’t try very hard to get jobs.
In New York, we found ourselves reunited but changed. New jobs, new apartments, new incomes, new tensions, new feelings. Our four-block radius between 13th and 11th, 1st and Avenue C, was not much like the walk from Hillegass Avenue to Prospect Street. I was surprised at how lonely I felt when I had the privilege of so many familiar faces. Still, we attempted to stick our landings. We never lost our love and tenderness for one another. We were simply learning through practice that there is rarely growth without pain. The unraveling of a college friend group is like the death of a star. Not always explosive, as we’re led to expect.
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I’m going through changes.3 That’s a line from a 1972 Black Sabbath song that Charles Bradley covered in 2016. You might recognize it as the theme song from the series Big Mouth. Bradley has the kind of face that will make you want to cry. His smile has the residue of heartbreak. I watch the "Changes” music video and think, yes, this is what change feels like. Bradley emotes to the camera while his song plays in the background. It’s devastating. The verses tell a story about heartbreak, but the chorus sails higher, capturing the precarity of more universal, capital-C Change. His delivery is a raw, hoarse, melodic shout. It’s a song that feels helpful. Cathartic. Medicinal.
In fact, “Changes” recalls one of my all-time favorite music videos: "I Wanna Be Loved” by Elvis Costello. Costello sits in a photobooth, where we watch him from a lens that verges on uncomfortably close. The video fades in and out of color as characters lean in from his left and right to kiss him on the cheek. No one has ever looked more gutted. I read in his autobiography that his tears were real. It never fails to make me cry along. When I watch it I think, yes, this is what stagnancy feels like. To be yearning so hard to feel something, anything. Why should this be my destiny?4 The self-importance of the unsatisfied is a worthy match for the perilous angst of a person in the throes of change.
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There will be more. Wedding bells are ringing in my family. Soon, I will disappear to Europe for two months. I am living in l’heure bleue,5 the moment of calm before the world awakens into all its deafening busyness. Holding my breath before the gun signals, GO! I don’t believe that the only constant is change. I don’t believe that you have to lose people to find yourself. I’ve always been headstrong. Solid when the world is spinning around. I can’t believe all these changes changed me.6
There is no solitude in New York. My roots reach farther than Lower Manhattan. I run into new friends in the park. The first firefly of the season flickers. I recognize a local octogenarian, always accessorized with a crusty dog and dueling cameras around his neck. Music, there is always music. I read a poem from a book he gave me last Christmas, grateful in the warmth that we will always be friends.
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything
continues to be possible7
“To Perth, Before the Border Closes,” Julia Jacklin
“California,” Joni Mitchell
“Changes,” Charles Bradley, The Budos Band
“I Wanna Be Loved,” Elvis Costello
I first came across the notion of l’heure bleue in the visually stunning (albeit slightly boring) Éric Rohmer film Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle.
“Changes,” Malice K
“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” Frank O’Hara (1959)
such a good read! Love this one